Yesterday at geofest, I went to a session called “Picture there, Picture that!” In the session we read a children’s book and used geography skills to make a birds eye view map of the book. We covered TODALSIGS which was a guideline for what we needed on our individual maps (i.e. title, legend, date, and name). Afterwards we presented the map to the class and talked a little bit about the books.
The presenter also talked about ABC books. They can be used to introduce a new topic by describing it using all the different letters of the alphabet. The presenter used an example from her classroom where she had the students make their own ABC book. Each student got a letter of the alphabet and created a page for a book they created.
This presentation was one of my favorites because it really integrated reading and geography together. The use of the children’s book made practicing map skills easy and fun! It also taught us the idea of how to make a birds eye view map and use legends to describe our pictures. The ABC book was a great way to help describe a topic in greater depth and I loved the idea of doing that for your own classroom. Overall, the sessions at geofest gave me a lot of ideas on how to integrate geography into my classroom beyond just learning map skills.
What did everyone else find interesting or useful?
I also enjoyed the “You-Twit-Face” because the presenter gave many ideas on how to incorporate social networking into a classroom instead of banding it. He mentioned going on class field trips and documenting through twitter what they have seen, or having students have educational twitter conversations on a specific topic. Although he gave many great ideas, I think that the majority of these ideas would work much better in middle school or high school rather than lower elementary. I also think it would be difficult to do because it cannot be assumed that all students have access to a twitter account unless they are provided school computer access. With time, I think that incorporating these social networks will become much more popular and I believe that this presenter is on the right track to engaging students that are growing up in a technological world.
I also went to this speaker. Once I was able to understand the instructions for the activity, I thought it was pretty interesting. The idea of making a map about a story was something I hadn’t heard about before, but something I would really enjoy using in my classroom someday.
A speaker I really enjoyed was the one who talked about technology in the classroom – You-Twit-Face. I found this very interesting, because I am not a fan of technology in the classroom. I think kids need to slow down on the usage… but the fact is that they are using it and if they can learn from it, why not?! He shared some really interesting sites that teachers can use in their classrooms. One I really liked is called, Blubbr (https://www.blubbr.tv/). You can play a video through this website for your students and have it pause at six different spots to ask a quiz question. The question pops up right on the screen and the students have 20 seconds to answer it. I also really liked the discussion of Twitter. I do not use Twitter, but after hearing the benefits to using it I just might have to pick it up. He explained benefits for both the students and the parents. Here is a link to a Twitter account I found for NYC schools, for an example. https://twitter.com/NYCSchools